РОЛЬ ЖЕНЩИНЫ В ЖИЗНИ ГЕНИЯ (ПО РОМАНУ СОМЕРСЕТА МОЭМА «ЛУНА И ГРОШ»)

The author of this publication analyzes the depiction of female characters in the novel “The Moon and Sixpence” by W. Somerset Maugham from the point of view of the female conceptual function. The theme of “love and art” and the role and place of a woman in the life and work of a brilliant artist who revolutionized painting have not yet been an object of a special consideration in literary studies devoted to this work. Meanwhile, the relationship between the protagonist and women is intended to demonstrate the novel’s conceptual idea of the hostility between modern Western civilization and the natural foundations of life, between the bourgeois aristocratic society and art. Three periods of the hero’s life (London, Paris, Tahiti), three types of relations between genders (marriage, short-lived romance, open relationship), three types of women (representative housewife, narrow-minded woman of an uncertain status, Aboriginal woman) are considered by the author of the publication as a gradual split of the hero of the novel with society: a wife and a mistress are an organic component of the civilization, while a native woman is a part of nature. The means of depiction of female characters in the novel are determined by the narrative organization of the text: the narrator has a minimum of portrait details in his arsenal, the main tools of psychological analysis are observation of the behavior of the heroines, their facial expressions, lines, as well as symbolism and mythologism.